For now, the only alternative to using BlueSky as your ATProto identity provider is to BYOD (Bring Your Own Domain, using did:web).
The fundamental problem with using a domain name as a social identity, is that it's like having to pay every year to keep your passport working. If you can't afford to pay every time your domain name comes up for renewal, you lose the ability to identify yourself on every service where you BYOD.
So only geeks who have domains anyway will do it.
(1/?)
Intriguing suggestion, but I suspect this is both more difficult to use, and more fragile. A domain name can at least be moved between registrars. I haven't tried to use DDNS (given I'm an aging geek this speaks volumes), so I don't know how persistent identifiers are across DDNS providers.
... so DNS is not the way to do it, as it's currently administrated, because domain names can only be leased. If we're going to use them for persistent personal identity, we need to fix that.
> a piece of cake
... and ...
> if the provider implements explicit support for _atproto TXT records. Many already have some level of API support for ACME cert TXT records
... do not belong in the same paragraph ; )
I suspect the tech hurdles are more significant.
Just over a year ago, I proposed that the same government departments that issue ID documents like birth certificates and passports, could provide a digital equivalent. In the form of a domain using the name on their birth certificate (eg myname.id.nz). Costing only a one-off issuing fee;
https://disintermedia.substack.com/p/a-free-online-birth-certificate
As I acknowledged in the piece, that would only address use cases where people want to attach their online activities to their real world identity. What about pseudonymous ID?
(2/?)
The problem is once everyone had such a device, it would be required everywhere, and would create even more of a surveillance society. This sort of universal ID has been proposed over and over, and always failed on those grounds.
Plus the spies and politicians need the ID system to not be totally airtight, since they depend on getting around it!
Maybe my thinking is still too centralised here. Rather than trying to establish a central ID guarantor ("One ring to Rule them all"), we could make use of something like "rel me" to cross-link our identities on different services;
In such a way that searching for an email (or AP or Matrix) address on an unrelated platform, would return any account on that platform with a "rel me" link to the address I searched.
It'd need good UX design though.
(3/3)
